My brother and my sister-in-law booked tickets for this film called Hanumanash after seeing the craze that this movie has recently.
My brother has a lot of faith in Neem Karoli Baba. I don’t know whether “worshiping” is the right word, but he is close to doing that. He worships him and believes that his destiny could be changed through him.
There are a lot of people who are devotees of Neem Karoli Baba, and my brother is one of them. I have recently come to know that my mother met Neem Karoli Baba when Neem Karoli Baba was not a big name. My mother’s ancestral home was in Nainital, and my grandmother, from the maternal side, used to visit Neem Karoli Baba occasionally because she was also a devotee of him. At that time, they revered him. They had faith in him. I won’t say that they were devotees at that time.
My brother decided that he is going to watch this film because this movie is being watched by cinema-goers like anything. Over time, this is one of the rare films which didn’t perform anything in the first week, second week, or third week. From the third week, or the end of the third week, it started to pick up, and suddenly, in the fourth week, it grew to such a humongous proportion that it was earning more than the blockbuster massi superhero films.
We went to watch the film, and I was somehow not very excited to watch this film because I saw the trailer, and I have a filmy background. I know the production is not very good. I was just expecting that the film, despite its production, camera work, and everything else that I saw in the trailer, would be good, would be surprisingly good, and would be interesting.
However, I found that no one in the hall was interested. Within half an hour, everyone was playing on their mobiles. My father, mother, or anyone near me, which I could see, was not interested in watching the movie. I remember opening my mobile here and there because I couldn’t find myself watching the film anymore. It was literally truly boring.
The problem with the movie was that it didn’t have anything. It didn’t have a story. It was just a series of events connected by a backstory where someone was narrating the story to a kid. He was just narrating the incidents that happened, and those incidents were isolated incidents which were not connected to each other. To make the movie interesting, they have put a lot of songs in the movie. Those songs were not little background songs. They were whole huge chunks of 56-minute songs, which kept on playing over the montages, and it bored the hell out of me.
I think somewhere people are unable to say anything against the film. It is because they believe that saying anything against the film will attract a lot of criticism from other people, because you don’t know what other people are thinking.
However, there’s one thing that I have realized, and it is that it cannot be a fluke that so many people are liking this film, despite the film being so boring for me. I personally believe that maybe the problem is with a few people who do not have that much devotion or faith in Neem Karoli Baba, because there are few films on Neem Karoli Baba who came before this. There was one film that came just 45 months back, and it didn’t work. There has to be something about this film which worked, but still, I couldn’t find it.
What amuses me is that this film is a blockbuster, and the biggest problem that anyone who is going to face in this film is going to be the film producers, directors, and actors of Bollywood and other film industries in India. This is because all of them have a tendency to follow whatever was in the market.
If a family film becomes a huge blockbuster, then for the next 5 years you will see a lot of family films coming from the film industries. If action films become a blockbuster, then for the next 5 years we are going to see a lot of action films coming out of the film industry, because they believe that if the audience is watching this film, they might be interested in that genre. They never refuse, they never stop to think that maybe it is the storytelling or the treatment of the film, which is one thing instead of the genre.
This film is one film that will confuse them more than anything. The reason being that this film does not have a story. It is just a devotional film. A lot of devotional films have come and gone, and none of them has become a hit. This film is an anomaly to be studied, just like Jai Santoshi Ma.
A lot of people do not even know that Santoshi Ma is not even a goddess mentioned in any of the Hindu scriptures. She was a fictional god. She was created just for the sake of the film. What was amusing was that Santoshi Ma became a part of Hindu culture after that. A lot of women were seen to be keeping fast in the name of Santoshi Ma, believing that they would get the same gifts from the goddess as the lead protagonist gets in the film.
Now, I have not seen the film completely. I have listened to the songs of the movie Jai Santoshi Ma. And I have seen the film in bits and pieces, but it does not change the fact that it had an impact on society as a whole at that time. The film was released in 1975.
Hanumanash, by any standard, is not a good film. Anyone who will watch it will get bored. Eventually, this thing will come out in the market: the film was not watchable. The people who are watching it are watching it only because of their devotion to Neem Karoli Baba.
I have been planning to go to Kanchi Dham Nannytal, which is where Neem Karoli Baba used to reside in his final years and which has now been converted into a temple. Recently, because of Steve Jobs, Julia Roberts, Mark Zuckerberg, and all these people talking about Neem Karoli Baba, this place has been turned into a tourist spot.
Is it my suggestion for you to watch this film? It is not. You can wait for this film to come on OTTs, and then you can watch the film, but going to the cinema hall to watch the film is overkill for me.